WOOLNER, Thomas

English sculptor and poet. He ranks with John Henry Foley as the leading sculptor of mid-Victorian England. He trained with William Behnes (1795-1864) and in 1842 enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy, London. In 1844 he exhibited at Westminster Hall, London, a life-size plaster group, the Death of Boadicea (destroyed), in an unsuccessful attempt to obtain sculptural commissions for the Houses of Parliament. His earliest important surviving work is the statuette of Puck (plaster, 1845-47; private collection), which was admired by William Holman Hunt and helped to secure Woolner’s admission in 1848 to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The work’s Shakespearean theme and lifelike execution, stressing Puck’s humorous malice rather than traditional ideal beauty, made it highly appealing.

Although eclipsed by Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Woolner was an important figure in the Brotherhood. He contributed poetry to its journal, The Germ (1850), and his work was committed to truthfulness to nature more consistently than that of any other Pre-Raphaelite, except for Hunt. This is evident in Woolner’s monument to William Wordsworth (marble, 1851; St Oswald, Grasmere, Cumbria). This relief portrait, which conveys both the poet’s physiognomy and his intellect, is flanked by botanically faithful renditions of flowers, emphasizing Wordsworth’s doctrine that in Woolner’s words, ‘common things can be made equally suggestive and instructive with the most exalted subjects’.

Disillusioned with sculpture, he left for Australia in July 1852, but his failure as a gold prospector meant he was soon working again as a portrait sculptor in Melbourne and Sydney. He returned to England in 1854 and gradually established a substantial practice in portrait sculpture, with occasional architectural and Ideal works, such as at the old Manchester Assize Court, the Oxford Museum, Llandaff Cathedral, The Lord’s Prayer and Love. He was a founder-member of the Hogarth Club in 1858. In 1861 be bought a house at 29 Welbeck Street and married Alice Waugh on 6 September 1864. He was elected ARA in 1871 and Royal Academician four years later. He was Professor of Sculpture from 1877-79.

After 1870 he received several commissions for public monuments and with his increasing prosperity became a collector. He died in London on 7 October 1892.